CRL add new associates in Winter 2015

Dr. Lambert is pictured on the right of Dr. Fatimah Jackson.

Dr. Marcus Lambert is currently Director of Diversity and Student Services at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Microbiology at New York City College of Technology. Dr. Lambert serves as an advisor on education policy and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) mentoring programs to a number of organizations in New York City and around the United States. Dr. Lambert has spoken at conferences on STEM education, advocated for science at the U.S. Capital, and washonored by the U.S. Department of State as a "Generation Changer." He completed his doctorate in biomedical science at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine, and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Michael Garabedian at NYU School of Medicine. His doctoral research focused on the bidirectional crosstalk between stress hormones and neurotrophins in the brain, which may lead to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of mood disorders such as depression. He is an alumnus of W. D. Mohammed High School in Atlanta, GA and Howard University in Washington, DC where he obtained a bachelor's of science degree in biology. Dr. Lambert resides in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and four children. His association with the CRL will expand our molecular biology capabilities with respect to the skeletal and dental collections on site. ****

Dr. Latifa Jackson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. Her research is highly integrative, incorporating aspects of human genetics, evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, modeling, and functional genomics. She is interested in how complex multigenic traits arise, inwhether the co- morbidities in certain complex traits within populations are a result of evolutionary processes and how long term environmental modifiers contribute of modulating trait expression. During her dissertation work at Drexel University, she developed a novel bioinformatics algorithm to identify functional regions of the genome enriched for sets of genes underlying a single or multiple complex traits. This algorithm takes a systems biology approach, interrogating functional, metabolic, and expression datasets to build a bioinformatics portrait of candidate genomic regions of interest. To date she has applied this algorithm to study the underlying genomic connection between opiate/ dopamine/ GABA driven substance addiction, to identify what infectious disease processes might be driving addiction phenotypes in African Americans and Central Chinese to identify candidate schizophrenia/bipolar disorder/ depression variants relevant for a historical population of Washington DC area African Americans. Each of these projects has deepened her understanding of how genomic hotspots participate in complex traits, but in order to make more relevant models of real gene interactions, she plans to incorporate more environmental data. At Howard University, she has begun to expand my analyses to incorporate epidemiological and behavioral data that can serve as a proxy for direct association analysis and begin to describe environmental factors. We welcome Dr. Jackson and her expertise in computation and evolutionary biology to the CRL. ****